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FIRST ON FOX: Melissa Ohden, founder of the Abortion Survivors Network, said Tuesday that the leaked Supreme Court abortion ruling left her “hopeful,” saying legal abortion left her and other abortion survivors “with physical, emotional, and mental traumas and disabilities,” while failing to protect their right to life.
Ohden, who survived an attempted abortion, was reacting to the leak of a draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade and would return the issue of abortion to individual states.
“Abortion survivors in our community are hopeful at the news that the very ruling that attempted to take our lives and left so many of us with physical, emotional, and mental traumas and disabilities may be overturned,” Ohden told Fox News Digital in an email on Tuesday.
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Pro-life activists Gianna Jessen (L) and Melissa Ohden (R), General Counsel for National Right to Life James Bopp (2nd L) and Director and Senior Fellow in the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice in Yale Law School’s Information Society Project Priscilla Smith (3rd L) testify during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee September 9, 2015 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“Abortion survivors in our Network are both male and female and range in age from infants to their 90’s, but for female survivors, this particular argument that overturning Roe is an attack on women’s rights rings hollow,” she continued.
“Without first the right to life, there are no other rights. And how can abortion supporters reconcile the current reality that as women who survived abortion attempts, we have the right to procure an abortion in our nation but we didn’t have the simple ‘right’ to be born in the first place?”
Pro-life activist Melissa Ohden testifies during about her experience living as an abortion survivor.
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Alito’s draft opinion in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, declared that “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Alito noted that Americans hold “sharply conflicting views” about abortion.
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“Some believe fervently that a human person comes into being at conception and that abortion ends an innocent life. Others feel just as strongly that any regulation of abortion invades a woman’s right to control her own body and prevents women from achieving full equality,” Alito wrote.
“Still others in a third group think that abortion should be allowed under some but not all circumstances, and those within this group hold a variety of views about the particular restrictions that should be imposed.”
Fox News Digital’s Bradford Betz and Tyler O’Neil contributed reporting
